Ut hoy! &c.

* * * * *

Now must I go there Christ was born,
Farewell! I come again to-morn,
Dog, keep well my sheep fro the corn!
And warn well Warroke when I blow my horn!
Ut hoy! &c.[80]

So, again, in the delightful poem that has won for Robert Henryson the
title of the first English pastoralist the warm blood of natural feeling
yet runs full. _Robene and Makyne_ stands on the threshold of the
sixteenth century, a modest and pastoral counterpart of the _Nut-Brown
Maid_, as evidence that there were poets of purely native inspiration
capable of writing verses every whit as perfect in form as anything
produced by the Italianizers of the next generation, and commonly far more
genuine in feeling. Even in the work of Surrey and Wyatt themselves we
find poems which, were it not for the general tradition to which they
belong, one would have no difficulty in regarding as a natural development
and conventionalization of the native tendency. Such is the _Harpelus'
Complaint_ of 'Tottel's Miscellany.' This was originally printed among
the poems of uncertain authors, but when it re-appeared in _England's
Helicon_, in 1600, it was subscribed with Surrey's name. The ascription
does not carry with it much authority, but is in no way inherently
improbable.[81] The opening stanzas may be quoted as conveying a fair idea
of the whole, which sustains its character of sprightly elegance for over
a hundred lines, ending with the luckless Harpelus' epitaph:

Phylida was a fayer mayde,